IBM InterConnect 2013 kicked off in style as more than 2500 top professionals from around the world attended the conference to discover how information and technology serve as the catalysts for unleashing innovation and gaining competitive advantage. The 3-day conference, from October 9-11, 2013 in Singapore, left the audiences to experience about some of the hottest trends in business and IT today including Cloud, Big Data & Analytics, Software Defined Environment, Mobile, Social Business and more with a broad agenda of general sessions, keynotes, solution sessions, including business best practices and technology roadmaps.

Each session at InterConnect was unique as it addressed some of the pressing issues organizations are facing with the ever-growing technological changes by building a smarter approach to the technology. Likewise, one of the most talked about sessions during InterConnect was “Cloud as the Growth Engine for Smarter Enterprise” presented by prominent international speakers including IBM senior leaders. The session was unique and exciting as it not only explained why Cloud is critical to enterprises to optimize their social, mobile and big data workloads but also described how IBM is helping thousands of clients realize the transformational benefits of cloud, providing the expertise, cloud technologies and choice of delivery models.

Business leaders are focused on not only the building and engineering part but also on the overall infrastructure part of the organization, said Tom Rosamilia- Senior Vice President, IBM Systems & Technology Group, in the exclusive session. But why infrastructure is a key? What organizations are going to do? The answer Tom highlighted here is to apply “technology” to create business value and make better decisions as according to the IBM CEO 2012 Study, technology is the number one factor impacting business leaders since last three consecutive years.

According to Tom, business models have fundamentally changed and are driving the need for a shift to more efficient and agile IT infrastructures, from monolithic applications to dynamic, composable and orchestratable services. Enterprises are turning to cloud infrastructure to revamp their existing business models while improving the responsiveness and manage an unprecedented rate of change without increasing risk or cost, said Tom. Outperforming organizations are using IBM clouds to achieve these business outcomes with the three key built-in attributes:

Designed for big data: The IBM Cloud architecture is designed for big data that brings instantaneous insights from all types of data, optimize access to billions of file, handles complex queries up to 2,000x faster and make analytics 43% faster with 99.99% uptime.

Open and collaborative: IBM cloud solutions are built on the foundation of open source and standards communities, to achieve integrated and interoperable cloud architecture and eliminate vendor lock-ins across the industry. For instance, IBM has announced zVM, the mainframes support for OpenStack, PowerVC support for OpenStack on Power platform, and OpenPower announced in August, a consortium around 5 companies to support Open standards.

Tom later shared some of the leading IBM offerings that have helped thousands of customers across the world to deploy trusted cloud solutions. For instance, IBM System z makes a great private cloud solutions, as 96 out of the 100 world’s largest banks runs on system z. IBM Pure Systems has been very successful among Managed Service Provider Networks and deployed 6000 units in 100 countries in less than two years. System x our x86 support, announced to deliver NeXtScale System, a highly dense server came in the announcement during InterConnect, providing twice the compute power of a standard x86 rack system. And for Storage, the most profound is Flash, and yes IBM announced a new device called Storwize V5000. The new Storwize V5000, the latest addition to the IBM Storwize family, delivers external virtualization, two-way clustering, and high performance at a competitive price. IBM Storwize V5000 has a built-in feature called Easy tier, which is a learning system that watches which data can be utilized fully from being in Flash and constantly reduces manual activity of tuning the data. Tom also briefed about a unique customer experience by mentioning about IBM cloud support for Tennis Australian Open infrastructure in Melbourne. With IBM cloud product portfolio support, 15.5 millions of Australian Open fans enjoyed tennis not just by watching it online but also by experiencing it without any interruption. With IBM’s unique cloud solutions, the Australian Open infrastructure saw a 42% increase in their page views as compared to the last year and 35% decrease in cost per page view. IBM is delivering the same experience to US Open and Wimbledon, Tom concluded.

IBM offers a choice of robust Infrastructure-as-a-Service as well as Platform-as-a-Service solutions for public, private and hybrid cloud configurations that provide flexibility, speed, performance, and security. Jamie Thomas, IBM General Manager, Software Defined Systems explained the next step along the cloud journey: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), a computing platform and a service model required for the efficient deployment of cloud services. According to Jamie, PaaS is critically important as it enables Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and through its unique capability it brings to life the business applications on the cloud. PaaS empowers increased business agility and speed, reduced cost of application development, based on open standards. Jamie also shared IBM’s unique expertise around PaaS, which is delivering the most flexible cloud solutions for building, integrating and securing cloud applications and enabling new rapid on-premise deployments through PureApplication systems and Power systems solution edition focused on entry configurations for power clients. Jamie believes PaaS’ ability is to have not only the composable services but also understand infrastructure to allow us to automate across these layers.

The above unprecedented expert insights from the session truly represents that today Cloud is a growth engine for business and IBM continues to lead and invest in end-to-end cloud portfolio through its efficient service models to help business leaders drive innovation & growth while improving the responsiveness of their IT infrastructure. If you want to see the full coverage of this exclusive session click here.

Stay tuned for our next space that will discuss about the “New Era of Computing” which is simpler, more responsive and more adaptive and prepare enterprises “now” to become smarter. Till then don't forget to tune into our Livestream feed to replay your favorite InterConnect 2013 keynotes!

This weekend I had the pleasure of participating in a very cold, rainy and windy charity bike ride to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of North Texas. Outside of work, cycling is my passion and normally 50+ miles on a bike is a breeze. Saturday’s ride was anything but, and since none of my riding partners were particularly chatty, I had a lot of time to think about the long and winding road that lay ahead. In particular, how this “epic” experience can parallel many virtualization projects. You invest a lot of time, effort, pain and suffering yet time seems to standstill and what little progress one makes seems to take forever.

In today’s blog I will focus on two of the many barriers that face enterprises in their quest to increase data center efficiency, IT economics and actionable insight.

The first barrier often is the lack of a fully virtualized IT infrastructure. A recent IBM study of virtualization with our enterprise clients documents that most clients have not moved beyond basic server virtualization. To improve the economics of IT requires virtualizing and optimizing servers, storage and network resources. In doing so, enterprises can achieve higher resource utilization, scalability and flexibility to address the ever changing demands of their business, clients and market segments. At the same time, IT costs are reduced through consolidation and elimination of under utilized resources.

The second prevalent issue blocking many enterprises from moving beyond virtualization to software defined environments that encompass software defined storage, software defined networks, software defined data centers and cloud is the lack of a common framework. Integrating and managing diverse, heterogeneous platforms requires a commitment by industry leading technology providers. IBM has made that commitment to Open Source and standards communities as OpenStack for infrastructure management and Cloud, OpenPower Consortium and OpenDaylight for networks. Open standards, architectures and solutions help enterprises integrate servers, storage and network devices and position themselves to reap the rewards of Cloud, Software Defined, Big Data, Social Business and Mobile. Jacqueline Woods, Vice President, Software Defined Marketing, addresses the benefits enterprises can achieve in her most recent blog post, “Infrastructure matters for cloud, for data, for success!” Simply stated, the IT infrastructure is the foundation for Cloud, Big Data and a host of new, emerging applications that enterprises can leverage for competitive advantage, increased business agility and real-time insight.

On Tuesday, October 8th, IBM announced several offerings within our Smarter Computing portfolio that will help enterprises improve the economics of IT through efficiency, increase the ability to drive real-time insight, revolutionize information sharing and ensure higher levels of security. You can read about these by following the announcement page link. Please also take a few minutes to listen to the announcement webcast and visit Jacqueline Woods’ announcement blog and learn why Infrastructure Matters, and how it can help your enterprise. Lastly, we recently published a Software Defined Environment solution brief available for immediate download.

Infrastructure Matters! Don’t stay on that seemingly long and winding road to nowhere; take my advice and come in from out of the rain!

The long and winding road that leads to……nowhere, fast? Sorry, I digressed for a moment. But, the very famous Beatles song does have applicability to the state of many companies’ implementation of virtualization. Without a fully virtualized data center that goes beyond servers to include storage and network virtualization, you might not be in a position to fully take advantage of the benefits of next generation applications as Cloud and Big Data!

A recent IBM study of virtualization with our enterprise clients notes that only 30% of the clients surveyed have virtualized storage and 15% have virtualized networking on a wide scale. The reason why more clients haven't fully virtualized is because without a common framework it is difficult and complex to virtualize across technology silos of server, storage, and networking. Leveraging open interfaces and open standards will help facilitate data center integration, and will get you off of the long and winding road to nowhere and on the road to real business results. IBM’s leadership in such Open Source and standards communities as OpenStack for infrastructure management and Cloud, OpenPower Consortium and OpenDaylight for networks help enterprises integrate servers, storage and network devices. Openness enables enterprises to be in a position to fully leverage Cloud and Big Data for competitive advantage.

On Tuesday, October 8, 2013 IBM will announce a series of offerings that will help clients proactively respond to today’s ever changing business environment by leveraging their entire infrastructure to provide real-time insights, share information securely, and improve the overall economics of IT. You can register and attend a global announcement webcast with our IBM senior executives to learn more about why your infrastructure matters, and how a Smarter Infrastructure can get you off of the long and winding road.

We are moving towards the "New Era of Smarter Computing" and we need to transform our business model and culture to gain competitive advantage.

So what is this “New era of Smarter computing” we are talking about?

This is the era where businesses react with speed and flexibility with shorter deployment times, manage infrastructure with predictive analytics and drive more sales with open standards to achieve reduced operational costs, optimized utilization and better customer experience.

Now the question is, what is inhibiting us to more to new era of computing?

Firstly all the businesses are cutting cost over IT expenditure for maintenance and administration, Secondly, limited access to data when and where required and thirdly, our resistance to move beyond our traditional silos infrastructure.

With all these inhibitions, how to move to New era of Smarter computing?

The phrase "software defined data center" has rapidly become an industry buzzword, and like most buzzwords, it's used a little too often. In this case, however, the buzzword strikes me as an accurate description of reality — and it's a reality that lies beyond traditional data centers.

According to a report , the global SDDC market is estimated at $396.1 million in 2013 and expected to grow to $5.41 billion in 2018. This represents an estimated CAGR of 68.7% from 2013 to 2018. This clearly shows that the IT arena is certainly moving towards SDDC. Enterprises are embracing a software defined data centers to transforms the traditionally infrastructure-centric data center, with their focus on ensuring the proper operation of compute, network, and storage elements, into an application or business service focused environment. Infact, number of vendors, including IBM, is actively developing the Software Defined Environment (SDE) approach and standards to deliver an efficient, robust business function by creating new solutions and intelligent and integrated management platforms for the overall and integrated SDDC. The Software Defined Data Center has become the defining architectural abstraction for infrastructure architects as it integrates legacy IT infrastructure as well as newer VM-centric, cloud, and workload-centric architecture.

Would you like to continue this conversation with your peers and turn your IT practices into profitable realities? Join our exclusive InterConnect 2013 Conference: the New Era of Smart, between October 9-11 in Singapore, to share your experiences and gain deeper insights from world’s leading experts about SDDC. The conference will feature a robust educational program focused on defining the current state of SDE, how it’s being implemented and give attendees an in-depth look at its best practices, what’s coming next, both in terms of technology and use cases. Additional highlights of the conference will be deployment strategies around other emerging trends, including Cloud, Big Data & Analytics, Social Networking, Mobile and more. Don’t forget to miss this exciting opportunity register today at InterConnect 2013!

When asking about IBM offerings in this space, Quan states that we have products that make up the capability of driving Software Defined Environments including open standards to achieve integrated and interoperable cloud infrastructure management. For the networking level, IBM capabilities bring significant benefits to complete network and cloud infrastructures. For instance, IBM’s DOVE (Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet) technology enables highly scalable network virtualization without requiring changes to the physical network. At the compute level, SDE is about how to correctly deploy virtualization, placement, and ability to manage extremely large compute clouds and all these capabilities came from the Platform Computing acquisition IBM made a few years ago. Then for storage, IBM have got offerings like Flash to boost critical application performance, gain efficiencies and strategically deploy resources for data management. Quan strongly believes in open standards and the importance of open standards to the growth of cloud and SDE to deliver both interoperability and value to the customers. IBM is already committed and applying its experience in supporting and validating open developments including its partnership with Pivotal for Cloud Foundry, OpenStack, OpenDaylight to name a few.

With Quan’s detailed plans for SDE, we can be sure that in the years to come, IBM will continue to support open standards — and through innovative solutions based on it, help clients around the world realize the full potential of Software Defined Environments.

Finally, we invite you to join us at IBM InterConnect 2013 to discover the best practices around the biggest trends in business today including Software Defined Environments, Cloud, Big Data & Analytics, Mobile, Social Networking and more. Register today and submit your experiences at InterConnect 2013.

Over the past few years, technology due to its rapid advancements has progressively risen on CEOs’ radar. It now ranks as the number-one factor impacting organizations. According to IBM 2012 Global CEO Study, 71% of CEOs identify technology change as the most important external force impacting their organizations. For the first time, business leaders across all industries are seeking answers to respond to the rapidly changing technological advancements. However, a well-organized IT infrastructure mainly, one that is software-defined will enable business leaders to respond to the dynamic market changes, anticipate customer preferences, and outpace competition by simplifying their data centers, making it more flexible, efficient, and less expensive to operate as rigid silos will be transformed into adaptive IT. With this ever-changing IT environment, would you still like to be twisted with data center complexities or move ahead for a simplified, responsive and adaptive environment?

Stay tuned because this October, IBM’s highly interactive and results-driven conference, InterConnect 2013 will address IT day to day challenges and showcase innovative technologies and real-world implementations based on IBM capabilities to achieve profitable business outcomes. At the conference — held October 9–11 in Singapore — IBM will present a workshop to its attendees, providing insights into the future evolution of IT utilization and deployment, the disrupting and pressing issues facing the industry, including the technology, policy, business dimensions and best practices around the biggest trends in business today like cloud, big data and analytics, social networking, mobile, software-defined environment and more. The conference will also provide a platform to connect and spend time with peers and subject matter experts to share your experiences, explore opportunities and hear how these disruptive technologies are reshaping the future of businesses around the world.

At this year’s conference, we are excited to announce that the keynotes session will be delivered by our very special guest, IBM’s Chairman, President & CEO, Ginni Rometty sharing her vision on how to speed our journey into A New Era of Smart. We’re also pleased to announce Mr Teo Chee Hean, Deputy Prime Minister, Coordinating Minister for National Security and Minister for Home Affairs, Republic of Singapore as our Guest of Honor who will deliver the opening address at InterConnect 2013.

We invite you to be a part of this unique conversation and learn how to position your business for success. Register today at IBM InterConnect!

As we discussed in Part I of this blog series, today’s successful enterprises, sales organizations and sales people need more data and better insight to anticipate and identify new customer trends, leverage new models of engagement and rapidly respond to new market changes. Two interesting facts from the Forrester study “Defining The 21st Century Salesperson” magnify the importance of these three imperatives even further.

First, Forrester estimates that SG&A costs are growing faster than revenues. And, that the hidden cost of sales alone averages $ 132,262 per rep/per year. Second, is that “customers now handle an estimated 53% of the traditional selling process via online research and self service.” In other words, if enterprises, sales organizations and salespeople do not use their IT infrastructures to provide deeper insight, leverage clients in new ways or respond to market changes, they might find themselves on the bench!

Anticipate and identify new customer trends: Capturing, managing and analyzing data, in real-time, to develop actionable insights, strategies, campaigns and tactics, will increase forecast accuracy, accelerate sales cycles, increase sales revenue and reduce SG&A. A software defined infrastructure that leverages software defined storage and software defined networks, creates a highly flexible, high performance software defined environment that includes storage tiering, resource optimization and virtualized scaling. The infrastructure is established using rules based on usage patterns, policies and processes to ensure data center resources are aligned to meet the needs of the business. The ability to perform real-time analysis and have the most often-used data closest to applications and users leads to faster, and deeper, client and market insight. Increased data insight helps sales and marketing adjust strategies to increase competitive differentiation, align offerings with client needs and demonstrate increased client value.

Effectively leverage new models of engagement:Social, mobile and big data all provide methods for enterprises and sales organizations to understand discussions in their market segment and how their brand is viewed. Accurate interpretation can lead to actionable insights which can provide new avenues to develop closer relationships with current and prospective clients. The challenges new generation applications place on today’s IT infrastructures directly impacts SG&A costs with lengthier sales cycles. Integrating traditional CRM, ERP, sales applications and existing business processes with social, mobile and big data is difficult at best.

Achieving effectiveness with a software defined environment, and integrating traditional and new generation applications can help reduce time to value for new business models by accelerating cloud deployment. A software defined environment can help lead to increases in IT productivity and SLA’s with rapid provisioning and management of heterogeneous virtual resources. IT can help enterprises increase responsiveness to emerging trends, market opportunities and competitive threats. The end result being more effective messaging, sales insight, sales strategies and tactics that reduce sales cycles, increase forecast accuracy, and reduce the ever widening gap between SG&A and P&L (i.e. sales revenue, profitability, etc.).

Quickly responding to new market changes: An underlying theme discussed throughout today’s blog involves how quickly enterprises can improve responsiveness in an increasingly complex and competitive business climate. In today’s economic environment, every qualified sales opportunity is like gold, because sellers’ clients are under pressure themselves to capitalize on market shifts, respond to changes in client demands, reduce sales procurement costs and deliver ROI faster! A software defined environment consisting of software defined storage and software defined network components will ensure secure, continued access to mission critical applications and data, when and where needed. An IT infrastructure, where software tells you what it needs to facilitate capture and analysis of big data, and rapid deployment of new revenue generating services can lead to accelerated sales cycles, increased sales revenue and increased customer relationships.

Having spent the majority of my career in IT infrastructure and Telecommunications network sales and management, I understand the importance of accelerating sales cycles, increasing forecast accuracy and establishing longer lasting client relations. The Forrester study “Defining the 21st Century Sales Person” highlights the dilemma facing today’s sales organizations embattled to find new clients, increase pipeline, increase sales and revenue growth. Lengthy sales cycles are one of the factors that drive rising Sales, General and Administrative (SG&A) costs.

At the same time, salespeople are the proverbial hamburger in between the bun, being driven to increase sales effectiveness, while clients are increasingly demanding sellers demonstrate greater differentiation and deliver more value or risk being removed from approved vendor lists!

Here’s the point, to be an effective sales organization requires deeper insight into emerging market and clients’ trends in order to open new doors, gain access to decision makers, collaborate and identify new opportunities, reduce sales cycles, close more sales and improve customer experience and loyalty. The underlying IT infrastructure; particularly, one that is software defined, will enable this to happen!

So, why does a software defined environment impact sales and client relationships? Simple! Success in accelerating sales cycles is dependent on 3 things: the ability to anticipate and identify new customer trends, leverage new client engagement models and quickly to new dynamic market changes. Bottom line, an enterprises infrastructure directly impacts the effectiveness of sales.

Our next blog will explore how a software defined environment can help enterprises, sales organizations and sales people achieve three imperatives: anticipate and identify new customer trends, effectively leverage new models of engagement and quickly respond to new market changes.

Increase responsiveness and agility: To keep pace with the rapidly changing business environment driven by social business, mobile and big data requires software applications to define the resources needed, and for the infrastructure to respond quickly. The Forbes article uses a couple of application examples to describe why clients need to evolve IT infrastructures beyond basic virtualization. Roger discusses the importance of a business critical application as fraud detection identifying a sudden spike in activity, which should drive an immediate reallocation of storage resources to capture and track fraud related data. A software-defined infrastructure, in Roger’s example, enables clients to become more responsive and agile by proactively and efficiently responding to changing business conditions. Many enterprises are challenged when integrating existing IT infrastructures with business processes because servers, storage or network devices allocated to an application, job or department cannot easily or readily be reassigned, ultimately negatively impacting responsiveness and business agility. (Ed. - The Datanami article “Rebuilding the Data Center One Block at a Time” discusses several of the barriers today’s IT staffs encounter when attempting to integrate legacy, back-office systems with new age applications as social business, mobile and big data.)

Improve IT economics through increased efficiency: Virtualization of servers, storage and network devices definitely has a positive impact on data center efficiency and utilization. However, a software-defined environment enables enterprises to unlock the power of their IT infrastructure by dynamically allocating resources, based on usage patterns, policies and business processes. Essentially, a software-defined approach enables IT departments to streamline infrastructures, using less hardware to reduce complexity and cost; ensuring data center resources run at higher levels of utilization.

So, there you have it! Three reasons why you should listen to what your software is telling you! Doing so can lead to increased responsiveness and business agility, reduced cost and complexity, increased flexibility and choice!

We’ll expand on the topic of software-defined environments in upcoming blogs, focusing on each of the three areas mentioned in greater detail. And, if you haven’t, read Roger Kay’s insightful Forbes article “Software That Tells You What It Needs.” In the meantime, please check out additional blog posts that discuss software-defined. Also, follow us on twitter @IBMSDE and @AlphonsoBrodie.